I should be moving along, but I'm going to take a brief break and write this entry. My painting has been on hold until I had a chance to go buy more paint. Well, today I had both the money and time to get more and headed out.

My preferred route takes me through a road noted for trains blocking the road. Of course, there was a train not only blocking the road, it was stopped across the road. Add to this there was road construction on that road knocking it down to a single lane right there too, ... well, there were more than a handful of frustrated drivers.

While I was waiting I was mentally rewriting a local law about trains not blocking a road for more than ten minuets. I know full well the city doesn't enforce the law as it stands ... anyway, I imagined that not only would the train be cited for the train company to receive their several hundred thousand dollar fine for blocking the road for more than ten minutes (<-- the current law, yes it's that steep a fine, but the train companies have deep enough pockets that they are willing to pay it the few times the city actually does enforce the law). Well, I would also add a fine to the engineer running the train who a monetary fine might have more meaning. Plus have the cops get the names and addresses of all the cars stuck so the train company could pay the gas money the drivers wasted while waiting.

After that fantasy rewrite of the law and a half hour later, I got out of that traffic nightmare and took an alternate route. So I visited Jerry; He's been handling all my paint needs all the way back to nearly the start of this month. Well, I got what I needed from him, priced lawnmowers, wandered around as I tend to do, and then found my way to the checkout.

Um, there was no one by the cash registers. I stood there with my normal confused face holding my paint. A kid with one of those red "can I help you?" jackets came up to me and asked if I wanted to check out. I said yes. She lead me to a self-checkout lane, scanned my paint for me, and pointed to a slot in the machine saying I put my money in there. Then she walked away.

While I was still paying, the machine verbally (I'm paraphrasing here) said I was standing too close and should back away a bit, then it told me I needed to give it more money. Uppity machines, lovely.

Well, it gave me my change, and I took my alternate route home with no road construction or trains.